Mainstream Media Coverage of the Shutdown Is Predictably Moronic and Terrible

Much of the mainstream media coverage of the shutdown is the stupid "he-said, she-said" coverage that the media has offered for the past ... couple of decades. Unfortunately, what the Republican Party has said over the past couple of decades has become increasingly unhinged from reality, with the mainstream media seemingly incapable of calling out the Republicans out on their blatant falsehoods.

So it goes again with the shutdown, which is not "Washington gridlock," "dysfunction," or anything else like that. Rather,

we have a faction making historically unprecedented demands -- give
us everything, or we stop the government and potentially renege on the
national debt. And it is doing so less than a year after its party lost
the presidency, lost the Senate (and lost ground there), and held onto
the House in part because of rotten-borough distortions [i.e., vicious gerrymandering].

You can call this a lot of things, but "gridlock" should not be one
of them. And you can fault many aspects of the President's response --
when it comes to debt-default, I think he has to stick to the "no
negotiations with terrorists" hard line. But you shouldn't pretend that
if he had been more "reasonable" or charming he could placate a group
whose goal is the undoing of his time in office.

The real question now is what Boehner, McConnell, et al. can do about
their hard-liners. A lot depends, for Americans and many others, on
their success or failure.

Yes - unfortunately, a lot depends on Boehner and McConnell being able to reign in the Republican crazies, which they have not yet proven able to do.

And subsequently, the Republican Party has not proven that it is able to govern a country. We'll hope that the voters remember this in 2014.

Two big examples of problematic self-government are upon us. They are
of course the possible partial shutdown of the federal government,
following the long-running hamstringing of public functions via "the
sequester"; and a possible vote not to raise the federal debt ceiling,
which would create the prospect of a default on U.S. Treasury debt.

The details are complicated, but please don't lose sight of these three essential points:

As a matter of substance, constant-shutdown, permanent-emergency governance is so destructive that no other serious country engages in or could tolerate it. The United States can afford it only because we are -- still -- so rich, with so much margin for waste and error. Details on this and other items below.*

As a matter of politics, this is different from anything we learned about in classrooms
or expected until the past few years. We're used to thinking that the
most important disagreements are between the major parties, not within
one party; and that disagreements over policies, goals, tactics can be
addressed by negotiation or compromise.

This time, the fight that matters is within the Republican party, and
that fight is over whether compromise itself is legitimate.** Outsiders
to this struggle -- the president and his administration, Democratic
legislators as a group, voters or "opinion leaders" outside the
generally safe districts that elected the new House majority -- have
essentially no leverage over the outcome. I can't recall any situation
like this in my own experience, and the only even-approximate historic
parallel (with obvious differences) is the inability of
Northern/free-state opinion to affect the debate within the slave-state
South from the 1840s onward. Nor is there a conceivable "compromise" the
Democrats could offer that would placate the other side.

As a matter of journalism, any story that presents
the disagreements as a "standoff," a "showdown," a "failure of
leadership," a sign of "partisan gridlock," or any of the other usual
terms for political disagreement, represents a failure of journalism***
and an inability to see or describe what is going on. For instance: the
"dig in their heels" headline you see below, which is from a
proprietary newsletter I read this morning, and about which I am leaving
off the identifying details.

This isn't "gridlock." It is a ferocious struggle within one party,
between its traditionalists and its radical factions, with results that
unfortunately can harm all the rest of us -- and, should there be a debt
default, could harm the rest of the world too.

About This Blog

I am one of the largely nameless, faceless bureaucrats who work tirelessly (and largely thanklessly) to help ensure that poor people don't go hungry - and a billion other tasks government bureaucrats do that no one notices until something stops working. Living and working in DC is making me angry - and I vent my anger as thoughtfully as I can. Well, OK, maybe I'm not terribly angry ... but I thought it was a good name for a blog. If you're also a bureaucrat, or angry, or thoughtful, I'm happy to entertain guest posts.